‘God’s Little Soldier’
Last year I lost one of my favourite novelists to #MeToo. Let me rephrase that, last year the #MeToo movement in India helped me understand that the man I saw as a political and moral compass in my country had (allegedly) been a sexual predator this whole time. Many have raised issues about his recent rehabilitation into the literary world in India and those questions resonate with me, but having read his interview today there was something more specific that struck me - God and goodness.
Kiran Nagarkar, as a novelist and a writer, was acidic and bitter. sometimes with humour. sometimes with a tinge of melancholy. When he spoke of himself, he often seemed convinced of his own defeat and smallness within larger systems. He also seemed to be, at the very least, agnostic and perhaps even an atheist. and today that man is gone. Today, when I read his words he is a man who is seeped in the conviction of his infallibility and a faith in God.
I read an article that attempted to rehabilitate him back in the world of writing. Having been dropped by Penguin, Nagarkar was picked up by a new publishing house and will have a new novel out this year. As a part of a marketing strategy, he was interviewed by a national newspaper and was given a large print and digital platform to speak. He was questioned on the MeToo allegations and this where I saw a new Nagarkar. He did what I have never seen Nagarkar the skeptic do - he invoked God. Multiple times.
He stood firm in his innocence. He pointed to his home, his partner and his female fictional characters to prove that he could not be a predator and then he said that he says that ‘by the grace of God’ and ‘God willing’ he had a clean conscience and would not censor his own writing. There was a hardness to Nagarkar that I have not seen before, it was a movement away from the self-effacing man to one who saw his role as part of society and one of faith. It was almost as if he turned to God, in his personal space, to identify himself as a good man.
I am unsure of how to end this post, because like many people involved and who supported the MeToo movement it was something that made us confront violence in our past and present, it made us all to keenly aware of things we had long let slide and thought impossible to stop. It simultaneously emboldened and drained me, it was therapy on steroids and this year I want to keep supporting it while taking time to untangle and think/feel through processes. Perhaps Nagarkar has the right to call upon God, perhaps I have no right to question it but something sits uneasy within me.
and here I leave it with you. so that we may sit uneasy together, in these times of change.